Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,49

Then when he left you put your mouth to the slot and sucked it out. One of the few useful lessons Johnny’s father had shared with him during their brief association.) Jude ate up everything. “What are these?” he asked, stabbing a chickpea from his chana masala at one of the many Indian restaurants down Johnny’s street. “They look like little asses.”

Now that the scene was exploding in New York, everyone had started to look the same—kids from Westchester and Connecticut loitering on the sidewalk in front of CB’s, sporting the band T-shirts they’d bought the previous weekend, looking for drunk kids to beat up. Johnny had tattooed every inch of their bodies—SXE on the inside of their lips, Xs on their hands—and he was running dry. Even his own band, Army of One, which was as central to the scene as any other, which sported legions of fans who knew his lyrics by heart, who spit them back at him onstage, had begun to disenchant him. Not long ago, one of his customers, no older than Teddy, had asked him to tattoo ARMY OF ONE across his chest. Johnny had declined. “You’re going to regret that one, kid,” he said, and he realized then how fleeting the scene was. He believed ardently in all the virtues his own body was tatted up with, but his brother was dead, and one day Johnny would be, too. Permanent ink only lasted so long.

But now, here was Jude, wide-eyed and green and full of gratitude, and every word that came out of Johnny’s mouth was a marvel. The kid was an empty canvas. So he lived with a drug dealer. That couldn’t be helped. “When you going to take me to the temple?” he’d ask. “When you going to take me to a show?”

Johnny gave straight edge a soft sell, combining good-natured ridicule with a casual dose of guilt tripping.

“How you like living with your dad, Jude?”

“It’s all right.”

“I hear his weed is out of this world.”

“It’s pretty good.”

“So, how long you plan on walking around like a zombie? Like, indefinitely?”

“I guess.”

“Good plan, kid. Sounds like you got it all figured out.”

The band was practicing at Johnny’s place, waiting raptly in their positions. Nothing got them off more than watching the exhortation of a new kid, and they knew it had to be handled with care. They hadn’t objected when Jude had shown up smoking a cigarette; they’d even invited him to jam with them and agreed he wasn’t bad. “Taught him everything he knows,” Johnny said. He’d introduced Jude as an old friend, leaving out any mention of a brother. After they covered Minor Threat’s “Straight Edge,” the song that spawned the phrase, Johnny told Jude that Ian MacKaye had written it for a friend who died of an overdose, and that was the closest they got to talking about what happened to Teddy. Johnny could see it sinking in, though, the dots connecting before Jude’s frozen eyes, the straight edge constellation. Any day now, he’d be taking the plunge.

“You seen any of that girl Eliza?” he asked Jude after the band had left. “Your dad’s girlfriend’s . . . ?” Johnny’s cat Tarzan purred obscenely against Jude’s chest. Johnny reached over, picked up the cat, and placed him in his own lap.

“Just that once,” Jude said.

Ever since Johnny’s own father had ripped him off, he had been wary of anyone whose intentions appeared too pure. Eliza was no exception. She’d been with Teddy the night he died—surely she had been present for the cocaine, surely she could have done something to save him—but she’d sworn that they’d hardly spent any time together, that they had been split up at the party. The closest she’d been to him was when she’d helped him put in his contact lens. The idea of Teddy stumbling blindly through his last night on earth, and the intimacy, however brief, with which this girl had known him, had filled him with a loneliness that dispelled his suspicion.

The restaurant where Diane Urbanski had made a lunch reservation for four was a Japanese place on Amsterdam that Les called “schmancy.” Aside from the red floor pillows and the menu, the place had no pretense of authenticity—its single waitress was a blond woman dressed head to toe in black, and Prince streamed from the speakers. The building had an airy, industrial feel, with silver air ducts hanging from the high ceiling and walls cushioned with black leather, as if